Happy twelfth day of Christmas! Anyone here planning where to plant a grove of twelve pear trees—or how to get rid of all those lords a-leaping? No? Well, the old traditions aren’t what they used to be. Indeed, a lot of folks anymore don’t know the twelve days of Christmas begin with Christmas—they are the twelve days of the Christmas season, December 25 through January 5. For Shakespeare fans, yes, that means tonight is Twelfth Night, which in Elizabethan England was the last and greatest night of the party; it was a time for the sorts of humorous reversals and playing of the fool which characterize old Will’s greatest comedy.
So this is the last day of the Christmas season, and tomorrow is Epiphany. The feast of Epiphany most likely began as a celebration of Jesus’ baptism, as it still is in Eastern Orthodox churches. In the Western church, however, the focus of Epiphany shifted to the coming of the magi. Their visit marked the first revelation of the Messiah to the Gentiles; it wasn’t exactly the first revelation of the Messiah to the Jews, but the appearance of the magi before Herod was the first announcement of Messiah’s coming to the broader Jewish world beyond Bethlehem. Epiphany is the transition from the Christmas season to Ordinary Time, and it turns our attention from the birth of Jesus to his ministry. It’s the outward turn from celebrating his coming to focusing on why he came, and thus to considering our own work in the world.
Also, by this world’s calendar, this is the first week of the new year, and so for VSF it marks a turn in another way. Last year, we focused first on detachment—on living life with open hands—then turned to grapple with the concept of integrity. A life of full integrity would be living with undivided mind and heart, which is only possible to the degree that we are aligned with the character and will of God. That launched us into a season of teaching on discipleship, on following Jesus’ for Jesus sake, being all-in with him and for him. Only detachment makes discipleship possible, and only faithful discipleship can produce lives of true integrity.
With the turn of the year, we’re shifting to new themes. That’s good, because the teaching last year did leave us with some logical questions. OK, so we follow Jesus, but follow him—where? How do we figure out where to go? And doing what? It’s all very well to say we need to follow him wholeheartedly, and true enough that we don’t do stuff to earn his approval, but we still have to be doing stuff, right? So what does that look like? And then, starting on the road with Jesus is one thing; starting is easy. Finishing well is the hardest thing in the world. How do we do that? What keeps us on the road? What gives us the heart to go on?
These questions boil down to two points of emphasis, I believe. One: discernment, which begins I think with seeing the world around us truly and centers on perceiving God present and moving in us and in our world. It’s knowing his voice when he speaks in any of the myriad ways he uses, recognizing God’s hand at work, and seeing his footsteps so we can walk in them. Two: hope, because hope is what keeps us following when the road is hard and long and dark. Hope is the bone-deep, marrow-deep certainty that—to invert one of Kent Denlinger’s regular observations—though there are hard chapters, God is telling a good story.
Now, to live in discernment and walk in hope is not easy. On New Year’s Eve, our family gathered for one of our Christmas traditions, one I commend to you without reservation. Every year, a community of musicians headed by Andrew Peterson set out on the Behold the Lamb of God tour, which concludes every year with a performance at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, for which they sell streaming tickets. (Fun fact: they’re still on sale, and good through the end of the month.) The second half of the concert is a performance of the album, but in the first half, everyone takes a turn with a song or two. This year, Jill Phillips said something that shifted my thinking a little: “We all want to be people who live in reality, who are people of honesty and truth, and yet at the same time are people of hope, as believers, and that’s hard. It’s hard to be people who live in reality, and don’t dismiss reality, and also are people of hope. And I think only by God’s grace can we do that.”
She’s right, which is why spiritual discernment is essential if we are to live in hope. It’s also one reason it can be so difficult, because we’re always tempted to take the wheel, and the Enemy is always trying to get our focus on the world and off our God who is moving in it. It’s good, then, that our themes in the coming months are discernment and hope; but that’s where we’re going. Today is the hinge between where we’re going and where we have been, as tomorrow is the hinge between the Christmas season and the rest of the year, and so I’ve cheated a little. The psalm for our call to worship is from the lectionary readings for today, and it’s an inward-focused song of praise to God. Psalm 147 praises God for bringing his people back from exile and making their defenses and their provision sure, thereby reestablishing them as his people among the nations. Our main text this morning is from the readings for tomorrow, and I believe it gives us the so that . . . turn from what God did to why. Hear, then, the word of the Lord from the book of the prophet Isaiah, the 60th chapter.
Now, VSF generally de-emphasizes sermon titles, but the title of this message is When the Kings Come Marching In, and I’m telling you that because I stole it from the book of the same title by Dr. Richard J. Mouw. Dr. Mouw is a philosopher and theologian from the Dutch Reformed stream of the American church, in which Sara and I, as well as Craig Smallegan, were raised; he also served as president of Fuller Theological Seminary for two decades and I think may still formally hold a professorship there, though he’s in his 80s. I’ve appreciated his work at a number of points, but perhaps most of all in this theological reflection on Isaiah 60. Dr. Mouw sees, and has taught me, that this chapter speaks profoundly to the tension of holding both present reality and present hope—of being a people of light in the darkness.
That is, after all, the great image of this passage: Israel freed of its self-centeredness and opened out to the world, ablaze with light amidst a landscape covered with a thick, dank blanket of darkness. And note this: it isn’t their own light; the light has come to them and risen above them. It’s the glory of the Lord shining all around them—but not for their sake. This is for the sake of the nations, so they will come and be gathered in.
They won’t all come in the same way, however. Some will come as family gathered into the people of God; we see this in verse 4, for these are the nations coming to Jerusalem as sons and daughters. Verses 11-14 tell us many will come as enemies, brought for the vindication of the people of God. Either way, they will come bringing all their wealth with them, to the honor of God and the blessing of his people, because it’s all God’s in the first place. As Psalm 24:1 says, the earth is the Lord’s and all of its fulness. In Genesis 1, God invited Adam and Eve to contribute to that fulness, with children and also with their works. Since their disobedience, humanity has been filling the earth in a spirit of rebellion against God; but as Dr. Mouw says, “God . . . never loses sight of his good creation. He must reclaim that which humans have used to rebel against him. . . . The earth—including the American military and French art and Chinese medicine and Nigerian agriculture—belongs to the Lord. And he will reclaim all these things.”
People sometimes ask why God would create people who will reject him. If you’ve ever asked my wife that question, you know the heart of her answer: for the sake of the good things they will make and the beauty they will create. She has consistently maintained that everything good made by human hands will be redeemed and have its place in the new creation. The lives of those who reject the Creator still matter and still have value, their good creations matter, and it is right for them to have the chance to create them. J. R. R. Tolkien called humans “sub-creators,” made to create in service to our Creator, and declared, “we make still by the law in which we’re made.” As Sara has long understood and as I learned first from her, that matters to God, however flawed our creations may be. That is much of the heart of Isaiah 60. Human culture will be judged, but its judgment will be not destruction but reclamation. This is an integral part of God’s ultimate triumph over sin and death. No good thing shall be lost. Everything will burn, but it will be the refiner’s fire to burn away the impurities of human sin.
Now, some things, that’s hard to imagine. To quote Dr. Mouw, “Some [things] will be changed almost beyond recognition. Swords will become plowshares. Spears will be changed into pruning hooks. Racist posters will become aesthetic objects that will enhance the beauty of the City. Perhaps missiles will become play areas for children. Once again, the emphasis here is on transformation, not destruction. God is still pictured as working with the ‘filling.’”
Talking of “changed almost beyond recognition,” Isaiah tells us in verses 10-18 even politics will be healed and sanctified to the service of God. The kings will come marching in, but not necessarily leading the parade. Many will be “led in triumphal procession” as defeated enemies to be held accountable for the evil they have done. There must be a reckoning for the ways in which the powerful have misused and abused the authority that comes from God alone; they must acknowledge their rebellion and wrongdoing; and that reckoning must be public. The blood of the innocents, the suffering of the vulnerable, deserves no less.
Note well, this is not about “us” vs. “them”; Christian rulers have done much evil to both Christians and non-Christians. Dr. Mouw asks, “Will there not be a very special and profound sadness that falls over the City when the accounts must finally be settled between the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland, between Mennonite martyrs and their Calvinist persecutors, between Christian plantation owners and their Christian slaves? In imagining what these kinds of meetings will be like, we can only trust in the biblical promise that God himself will wipe away the tears from the eyes of his children.” But they must happen, as he continues, so that “the sins that have been committed in political history will be publicly exposed in the Holy City.”
And then, once done, it will be done, and God’s healing and sanctification will extend even to politics. That’s the point of the startling image in verse 16—the NIV changes it, alas—where Isaiah declares, “You shall suck the milk of nations; you shall nurse at the breast of kings.” In Western history, the language of power and authority has been heavily “male,” not just linguistically but in a violent and militaristic way, and that language has drawn heavily on the Old Testament—superficial readings of Scripture, I believe, but effective ones. Isaiah with one line subverts all that, inverts it, turns it inside out and backwards. As Dr. Mouw sums it up, “Politics will become a force for the giving of life. King-mothers will feed the people of God.”
All of this is part of the full restoration of the image of God on earth—is fundamental to it, in fact, because there’s something critically important which is regularly missed. Genesis 1 doesn’t say Adam was made in the image of God, or that Eve was, it says humanity collectively was made in the image of God, male and female together—and all our other differences together as well. In Christ, all barriers between men and women, between rich and poor, between dark brown people and medium brown people and light brown people and even those of us who burn by moonlight, between race and clan and language and nation, have been abolished, and we will all be gathered into the kingdom of God as equals to fulfill the image of God; but none of the good that makes each of us different unto ourselves will be lost, and each of us will bring the riches of our own traditions into the City of God as part of the wealth of the nations.
Just to take one group of people, I weep to think of the ways in which Black people in this country have been hindered and constricted in developing their own glory and honor, but their glory and honor bring me to my knees all the same. Much could be said about that, but let me speak to what I know best: what we owe to my Black brothers and sisters of the pulpit is nothing that should ever be lost. People like Dr. King and Rev. Shuttlesworth became forces for civil rights because they never stopped being preachers of the gospel.
I could keep going on about this, but let me close by laying out a couple implications of all this for the work we will be doing together in the coming months. First, whenever we seek to do the work of discernment, we do it within our sense of what is possible, how the world works, how God works, what God is on about, and where everything is going. I’ve spent time in the Vineyard church with healings and prophecies and people speaking in tongues, and I’ve been part of churches that would have said none of those things could be God at work. People in those two very different settings may be equally close to God and equally devoted to following Jesus, but their efforts at discernment will look very different because their frames are very different. Granted that God does like blowing up our frames, they still matter, and they still affect our understanding of God and what he’s calling us to do.
With that in mind, I think Isaiah 60 enlarges our frame and scope for the work of discernment. I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to find a sort of political quietism highly appealing. I vote—I continue to find John Piper’s essay “Let Christians Vote as Though Not Voting” wise and helpful—but I do it because it’s what God has set to my hand to do, not because I believe it will accomplish anything. I’ve said for years my only political platform is “pray for revival.” I don’t think I’m wrong to say we have no other hope, but we never do, whatever the political situation. Isaiah is convicting me that I’ve gone too far in writing off the process, and the current state of American culture; and, to be brutally honest, that a lot of my motivation is sloth, acedia, the sin of not caring enough. I don’t feel I have the energy, and I don’t want to spend what I have. I don’t want to put in the work, so I find ways to justify inaction.
And make no mistake, there’s hard work to do. Dr. Mouw sums it up well: “We must train ourselves to look at the worlds of commerce and art and recreation and education and technology, and confess that all of this ‘filling’ comes from God. And then we must engage in the difficult business of finding patterns of cultural involvement that are consistent with this confession. If, in a fundamental and profound sense, God has not given up on human culture, then neither must we.”
But here’s the thing: what’s the reason for those “must”s? Grim duty and grinding determination? No, but that God is at work here. The Lord is at work, and the peoples of the earth will bring the wealth of the nations into the City of God, and so nothing is truly hopeless—and nothing is truly pointless, either. As such, in doing the work of discernment, we should keep bringing ourselves back to the reality we have emblazoned on our wall that God is bigger. He’s bigger in what he can do, bigger in what he is doing, and bigger in what he wills to use us to do—and however much bigger we make our vision, he’s still bigger than that.
This points to the second implication I want to highlight, which we see in verses 17-22: our hope is embodied. Ultimately, hope is a person; we can know he loves this world the way we do because he experienced it the way we do, with the wind in his face, the heat of the sun on his skin, and the feel of the dirt under his feet. Our hope is spiritual at its core, but it has never been merely spiritual. We are not promised the things we want in this life, but Isaiah is clear: all that is truly good will be ours when the world is made new, and no good thing will be lost.
Cover detail of When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, Richard J. Mouw (Eerdmans, rev. ed., 2002)